“Patent troll” and “required actions to preserve trademarks” are two totally different things. The former is objectively bad in all ways. The second is explainable if there truly is a trademark and said gear infringes on the trademark and may be excusable if the Linux Foundation is forced to act to preserve their branding (trademark law is weird). It’s even more explainable if this is a shitty auto filter some paralegal had to build without any technical review because IP law firms are hot fucking mess. I’m also very curious to see the original graphics which I couldn’t find on Mastodon. If they are completely unrelated and there was an explicit action by someone who knew better, the explanation provides no excuse.

Attacking any company because the trademark process is stupid doesn’t accomplish much more than attacking someone paying taxes for participating in capitalism.

The trademarks owned by the Linux Foundation are listed here: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/trademarks Neither "systemd" or "segmentation fault" are listed. Something smells funky here.

I have rather serious doubts that this is legit. More likely some joker pretending to be from the Linux Foundation sent Redbubble a takedown request.

The complaint is not about the terms "systemd" and "segmentation fault." Those are the titles of the affected artworks. Presumably the artworks themselves contain some trademarked property.

Also, this is utterly unrelated to patents.

this has nothing even remotely to do with patents, fam

but it is indeed bullshit.

the purpose of a "trademark" is to prevent the public from being deceived about what they're purchasing, so you can't sell "Big Macs" on your own because the public might be deceived into thinking they were purchasing a product from McDonalds, which (I assume) has trademarked the use of "Big Mac" for fast food.

I HIGHLY doubt the Linux Foundation owns the trademark for "Segmentation Fault" with respect to random merch, so... yeah 100% bullshit

(The image does also say "Linux IP" in addition to "Linux Trademark" and I wonder what the hell that is supposed to mean, since "IP" covers a multitude of dissimilar things, maybe it's just a vague handwavy assertion they make in order to make a takedown without particularly justifying it?)

Ok but redbubble is fucking infamous for selling merch with blatantly stolen artwork and logos.

Are we certain this complaint was lodged by the Linux Foundation? Frequently DMCA takedowns happen because someone who is not the original rights holder made the complaint. Even when there's no actual rights being violated. Essentially people taking advantage of automated systems or just people not wanting to deal with possible legal issues, trolling of a different sort.

Great, now we need to start The Linix Foundation

I'm interested to hear your novel theories about how trademarks and patents are related

The Linuses (Lini?) just can't stop screwing up this week.

That's stupid. Can they not just focus on whatever their purpose is?

"Linux" is owned by Linus Torvalds. Can he ask this foundation to change its name ?

You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.

WTF!